"If I stopped feeling guilty I'd stop going"

This is the objection that keeps the guilt in place, so it needs a proper answer.

The fear is that guilt is the engine. Remove it and the car doesn't move. You'd ring less, visit less, become the sibling you resent. It's a reasonable fear, and it rests on a hidden assumption, which is that guilt is what gets you through the door. Cicirelli's finding says otherwise. Attachment got his daughters through the door just as reliably as obligation did. The love was already sufficient. The guilt was riding on top of it, adding burden and not adding visits.

Here's a second piece. Judith Gonyea, Ruth Paris and Lisa de Saxe Zerden studied 66 midlife daughters caring for ageing mothers in 2008 and asked how much of the burden the daughters felt could be explained by guilt. Guilt predicted burden on its own, after they'd accounted for how much care was actually being given and how difficult the situation was. Two daughters doing the same amount for mothers in the same state could feel very different weights, and the difference was guilt. Their conclusion was that clinicians should help carers revise the standards they judge themselves by.

Put the two findings together. Guilt doesn't increase the care. It increases the burden of the care. So the fear has it backwards. It isn't that without guilt you'd stop. It's that with guilt you're carrying the visits and something else, and the something else is what's making you wonder how long you can keep going.

Test it. Think of the last time you went and were glad to be there, the visit that wasn't a should, where you stayed longer than you'd planned because the afternoon was good. Nobody made you. That's the engine that was always there. What guilt adds is not more of those visits. It's the fizz on the drive over and the second guilt on the drive back, and neither one gets you through a single extra door.